Do I... actually like Microsoft Teams?

About 2.5 years ago, my data science team was part of the AuthAI acquisition by Availity.  Among the many challenges was one of tooling: we were going from a Google Suite / Zoom / Slack setup to Microsoft Suite.  I hadn't touched Microsoft Suite since leaving IBM in 2016, which was prior to the existence of Microsoft Teams; we used Webex for conferencing (just audio and desktop sharing) and had no messaging system, just email.  This was clunky for distributed, remote collaboration, but we made it work. 

Both Dataiku and Olive AI had Google Suite / Zoom / Slack setups, which I thought worked very well.  GSuite was (and still is) superior for collaborating on documents, and Slack was the missing link for semi-synchronous communication that moved faster than an email (or setting up a meeting) and was less demanding and intrusive than a phone call.  The main problem was that Zoom was necessary for anything other than a small group meeting, and anything typed in the Zoom chat was extremely inconvenient to get into Slack; at Dataiku, our solution was to use Slack channels as the meeting chat (at least for anything we wanted to keep; "whatever happened in Zoom chat stayed in Zoom chat."

So, there was naturally some trepidation when moving to Microsoft Suite.  Focusing on what looked promising, I pointed out that Teams meeting chats were saved directly the product, which was an improvement over Slack + Zoom.  This was cold comfort to a team used to Slack, and identified a number of pain points on Teams:

• Chats and channels were separate tabs, which meant people responding to chats would miss new messages in channels, driving people to send messages in chats rather than use channels.  The ideal is for the vast majority of conversations to happen in public channels so that knowledge is shared and new ideas get eyes on them, and Teams was encouraging the opposite.  MS fixed this by putting chats and channels in the same tab; sadly, the damage has been done and we have to retrain ourselves to use channels, but this is progress.
• Meeting chats were simply chats, not part of any channel, which meant that if a new instance of a meeting was created, say, because ownership of a meeting changed (MS doesn't allow you to change meeting owners; you need to create a new meeting), an entirely new meeting chat would be created.  You can now schedule meetings within a public channel, so while the new meeting chat would still be created, at least all the meeting chats will be in the same channel.  1:1's are still a problem, because you still end up with your personal chat with a person in addition to the 1:1 meeting chat.  Still, there is progress here.
• No custom emojis meant you couldn't inject your own team/company character.  This made using Teams less *fun*; while it's not a "get stuff done" feature, it's an important quality of life feature.  This was fixed earlier this year.
• Similarly, only one emoji reaction to a message was fixed this year.
• Teams seems to play badly with hardware.  I have a Sony bluetooth headset that worked fine with Zoom on my Olive laptop; on my Availity laptop, I'm inaudible when using the mic on my headset on Teams.  This continues to be a problem; I know this because Teams will sometimes change my mic setting from the external webcam to the headset.  This remains a problem.

All in all, significant progress has been made by MS in delivering on the promise of the premise that Teams would provide better integration into the rest of the office suite than GSuite / Zoom / Slack.  Calendar is now fully integrated, and I can mostly ignore Outlook, just checking the inbox a couple times a day.